Sci-Fi Sunday: The Good Ol’ Days

It’s no secret that my first love is science fiction. When I was young, I would sit and watch the weekend movies while my mother studied. While most of the movies were those B –rated horror (Dracula, Wolfman, the Mummy), occasionally they would show a science fiction ones and I would sit and watch and play with my Legos all afternoon.

Some of my favourite were the Godzilla movies. I think I’ve seen just about all of them. As a pre-teen (9-11) Godzilla was my hero. I wanted to meet him, or at least be one of those tiny Asian girls who lived on Monster Island. I remember one night there was a new Godzilla movie coming on television-Godzilla vs. Rodan, and my grandmother wouldn’t let me stay up to watch it. I was so upset! It wasn’t fair! Years later when I saw it advertised, you can bet I watched it.

There were other movies I came to love as well; War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Fantastic Voyage, Time Machine, and just about anything with giant creatures that were the result of nuclear testing. Star Wars intensified my love for the genre and after that, I had to see anything that was in space. Unfortunately, I was too young to see most of them and my mom thought they would scare me, so I didn’t see many more until I was a teen.

Today, I’ll still watch a science fiction movie over any other kind, but my taste is more discriminating. I won’t watch a poorly written movie no matter who’s in it, or how much it cost. There are a few modern ones that grabbed my attention, but science fiction isn’t as popular as it once was. Our need to explore space was fuelled by these movies. Maybe in our need know what’s out there, we’ve taken the mystery and the fun out of the genre.

How ironic.

P.S. I happened to come across the original Godzilla movie some weeks back. No dubbed dialogue, no Raymond Burr scenes. I had to read the movie, but it was worth it.